'Paul Bowles' Doc Goes to First Run Features

By
Sophia Savage
|
Thompson on HollywoodFebruary 11, 2013 at 12:58PM

First Run Features has acquired all US rights to Submarine Entertainment's "Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open," from director Daniel Young. Canadian rights have gone to Films We Like. A release will be coordinated between then and First Run Features later this year.

First Run Features has acquired all US rights to Submarine Entertainment's "Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open," from director Daniel Young. Canadian rights have gone to Films We Like. A release will be coordinated between them and First Run Features later this year. The film recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival.

The film is based on interviews with Bowles done shortly before his death in 1999. The documentary takes a look at the pre-Beat writer who echewed the spotlight to live in North Africa with his wife Jane. The film also features Jane Bowles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ira Cohen, Edmund White, William Burroughs, Francis Bacon and others. More on Bowles below.

First Run Features' Marc Mauceri states: "Paul Bowles has remained an enigmatic, esoteric figure decades after the publication of his greatest work, 'The Sheltering Sky.' Perhaps this explains our endless fascination with not only his art, but also the near-mythic quality of the life he created for himself half a world away. Young's superlative film captures Bowles at his most captivating, revealing the heart and soul of this one-of-a-kind artist."

The fact that Paul Bowles is less well known than fellow writers like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac may be because, after pursuing a nomadic lifestyle at the beginning of the 1950s, publicity-shy Bowles decided to settle in Tangiers, Morocco. There, far away from the hurly-burly of the literary world, the town became a permanent home for this homosexual writer and composer and Jane, his lesbian wife. Bowles' austere, almost Calvinistic view of humankind and the psyche, as well as his outright refusal to subscribe to the zeitgeist, distinguished him from other Beat Generation writers throughout his life.

Thompson on Hollywood

Born and raised in Manhattan, Anne Thompson grew up going to the Thalia and The New Yorker and wound up at grad Cinema Studies at NYU. She worked at United Artists and Film Comment before heading west as that magazine's west coast editor. She wrote for the LA Weekly, Sight and Sound, Empire, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly before serving as West Coast Editor of Premiere. She wrote for The Washington Post, The London Observer, Wired, More, and Vanity Fair, and did staff stints at The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. She eventually took her blog Thompson on Hollywood to Indiewire. She taught film criticism at USC Critical Studies, and continues to host the fall semester of “Sneak Previews” for UCLA Extension.